CONTENTS:

* Personal Milestones
* March UoTD
* BOINC News
* Project of the Month
* BOINC Standings
* March Trivia Winners
* Other Projects of interest
* Quote of the Month
* Member of the Month Interview
* Request for Guest Articles
* Spring Race
* Team Standing and OS Support
* Formula BOINC Standings

Personal Milestones -Orion

SETI.USA would like to thank ALL of it's dedicated members and offer CONGRATULATIONS to all those who achieved significant personal milestones in March/April. As you all know, we are growing exponentially. We now have:

101 members with 1,000,000+ SETI
180 members with 500,000+
777 members with 100,000+

146 members with 1,000,000+ COMBINED
283 members with 500,000+
1,024 members with 100,000+

View SETI Milestones

View BOINC Milestones

March UoTDs -SargeD

We had another very good month for User of the Day in March with a total of 59.  Our best projects were NQueens with 4 and Pirates with 4. We are currently at 506 total which places us in the number 8 position and only 63 behind #7 ranked BOINC@Heidelberg and 78 ahead of #9 ranked Rechenkraft.net.

Congratulations also to our top 3 members: theflux with 6 for the month, Steve @ SETI.USA with 4 for the month and blurf with 4 for the month.

View UoTDs

SETI.USA Surpasses 1 Billion BOINC Cobblestones -Blkjack-21

"On March 24, 2005 Team SETI.USA was created to consolidate..", something familiar that has been displayed within our Team's site and many of the BOINC project's team pages. Our Team recently celebrated it's 3rd anniversary. Once SETI.USA became the top producing BOINC team, many teammates asked "So what is next?". Much of our Team's inspiration has been to set goals and achieve them. Then someone suggested, "How about as a team, we attempt to be the first team to reach 1 Billion cobblestones?". This thought was then quickly adopted as one of our long-term goals.

During our push for 1 Billion Cobblestones, there were some tense moments. There were some tremendous surges from a few of our BOINC Competitors (teams) that put our goal in jeopardy. We were fortunate enough to match our Competitor's surges through new membership, new hardware acquisition, and strategic project selection. On Friday, April 11th 2008, this goal became a reality. SETI.USA became the first team to surpass 1 Billion BOINC Cobblestones Combined with a little over 100 Million Cobblestones to spare. Many members from other BOINC teams like SETI.Germany, Planet 3DNow!, and L'Alliance Francophone have visited our Team's forums to wish us Congratulations and recognize our accomplishment.

Many members of our team recall in the early days of SETI.USA one of our first goals was to surpass 1 Million Cobblestones for SETI. The timeframe was from the inception of the team (April 2005) to Halloween 2005. Actually, our goal was first set to be New Year's Day of 2006. However, some members were bold enough to believe that we were able to accomplish this goal much sooner, so the bar was raised. These same members that recalled this first goal have stated their continued amazement of how much this team has grown. (and yes we surpassed 1 Million Cobblestones before Halloween 2005). As a comparison Team SETI.USA, on average, now produces approximately 2.9 Million Cobblestones per day. My, how much we have grown!

It is critical to point out that it was because of every member of Team SETI.USA that we were able to succeed in such a tremendous milestone! Every member of Team SETI.USA is key to our past, present, and future success. We personally congratulate and thank every member of Team SETI.USA for their participation in this groundbreaking accomplishment!

"Together we will (continue to) accomplish something amazing!"

Project of the Month: -DrBob

SETI.USA encourages its members to participate in the project of their choice. Now that we have accomplished the team’s original goal of being #1 in SETI@home credit in ALL BOINC projects is valuable to the team’s future success.

Some members have asked for direction as to which projects they should allocate their resources to. Therefore we have decided to designate a “Team Project of the Month”. The chosen project typically will be one in which our team currently has a poor showing in that projects standings.

Einstein@Home has been chosen for the Team Project of the Month for April.

Our team is currently ranked 28th in BOINC standings on the project and we are hoping enough members will participate to improve our standings there by May 15th. Additionally our Spring Intra-team race is also on Einstein@Home and will run concurrent with our Project Of The Month.

Einstein@Home
Project URL: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
Create an Account: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/create_account_form.php
Join Our Team: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/team_display.php?teamid=3737

Those members participating should consider installing the Einstein@Home Power User Applications which should decrease the amount of time needed by your machine to finish work units. These applications should be compatible with any machine that has the SSE instruction set.

Boinc Standings -DrBob

Other Projects of interest -SargeD

SETI.USA encourages it's members to crunch whatever project most interests them. However, there are a few projects that we run that do not interfere with our primary projects, yet help us to increase our overall numbers in BOINC. Two of these projects are Pirates@Home and Depspid. Depspid is a non-cpu intensive project that uses some of your bandwidth. Pirates@Home uses the CPU but the WUs are so short (usually less than a minute) that they never interfere with production on other projects. Work for these projects is very sporadic, so we encourage our members to connect and stay connected so that when work is released we can grab our share. Please consider connecting to these projects if you have not already.

Quote of the Month:

"The world is a great mirror. It reflects back to you what you are. If you are loving, if you are friendly, if you are helpful, the world will prove loving and friendly and helpful to you. The world is what you are."

- Thomas Dreier -

We are running our spring 2008 intra-team race on the Einstein@home project. The race started at 0000 UTC on Saturday April 19, 2008.  We have 3 teams involved and the finish line is set at 1,200,000 cobblestones.  The first team to pass that mark will be declared the winner.  The race is projected to last about 3 weeks.

If you are interested in keeping up with the race you can view the stats at http://www.thesonntags.com/SpringRace/ .  Our thanks go out to Slicker for developing and hosting this "real time" stats page!

Team Standing and OS Support -Steve

This chart has been revised to incorporate DrBob's previous weekly project ranking format. More data columns have also been added to track our team's total credit (T.C.) and recent average credit (RAC) against the top teams in each for every project. Total Formula BOINC credits earned by our team are also included now. It also indicates which projects have native 64-bit apps for 64-bit OSes.

RED lettering is used to draw attention to projects of most interest, currently.

View Chart

We are currently tied for number one with L'Alliance Francophone at 166 points each. Awesome job! We are at a point where the lead is probably going to shift back and forth several times before we take a commanding lead.

We currently hold the #1 spot in 7 of the Formula BOINC projects:
DepSpid
LHC@Home
QMC@Home
RCN
RieselSieve
SETI@Home
Traveling Salesman

For those of you who are interested in keeping up with Formula BOINC standings, zombie67 does a weekly update at our message forum here.